Snowfall On The Sahara

It’s hard to credit it, but Natalie Cole has been plying her trade for a total of 21 albums now. And for those who made her acquaintance through her duetted song cycle with her electronically-reincarnated father, Unforgettable, With Love, rest assured that she continues to plough a compatible, if parallel terrain on Snowfall On The Sahara.

Cole’s voice has always sold itself, with need for neither fear nor favour of the spin doctors. She’s lucky enough to have a vocal range that stretches from Diana Ross-ean saccharine heights to Aretha-esque depths. Which is surely a recipe for billboard bonanza – at the very least.

The sleevenotes sell this as a major departure for Cole: a swing shift from the plethora of sentimental covers which have populated most of her last 10 albums. And while the material here is far more wide-reaching than her previous efforts, it’s nowhere near pushing the inside (never mind the outside) of the envelope yet.

Sure, she delivers an inspired cover of the old Roberta Flack classic, ‘Reverend Lee’, and yes, indeed, she lends a sultry touch to Taj Mahal’s ‘Corinna’, but with none of the sweat and tears that such material demands. This is New York session playing underneath soporific vocals. Ideal fodder, perhaps, for a Friday night’s stockbroking knees-up, but hardly the stuff of hairs standing on the back of the neck.

It’s as though credibility were measured by the volume of alternative writers whose work can be mined for the purposes of Ms. Cole’s latest big budget recording. Bob Dylan’s ‘Gotta Serve Somebody’ is a case in point. In Cole’s hands it’s little more than a cleaned up, scrubbed down cover that’s been wrung dry of its passion and poise. And her laboured preface of ‘Thank You Mr. D’ does little to ingratiate either.

Reservations (nay, downright horrors) aside, Snowfall On The Sahara does come up with the occasional gem, like Judy Collins’ ‘Since You Asked’, replete with pastoral, low key production. But such rays of light are merely brief reprieves from the sheer banality of this song collection.

Pity, really. Natalie Cole’s got no need to prove her vocal worth. What she does need to do, however, is to step into the fresh air and breathe it deep into her lungs. Because listening to Snowfall . . ., it sounds like she’s been holed up in the nether world of musos for far too long now.